World of Warcraft: Cataclysm?

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A casual analysis of the titanic MMO's subscriber drop.

By Ryan Scott

It's a problem that most massively multiplayer online game developers might surrender vital organs to have: over the past 15 months, Blizzard Entertainment's 400-lb. virtual gorilla, World of Warcraft, has dropped from 12 million to a pitiful 10.3 million global subscribers (as of November 8, 2011, anyway). It's a precipitous 14.1% drop -- owed, one way or another, to the somewhat polarizing World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion. But what exactly has happened to the MMO space's star attraction?

Wild mass guessing -- a favorite of forum-going gamers everywhere -- produces any number of hypotheses. One constant favorite, the "World of Warcraft is finally getting taken down a notch by some other upcoming MMO" assumption, might actually hold some water this time around: In a June 2011 Gamasutra interview, Trion Worlds' David Reid boasted that Blizzard's then-announced 600,000-subscriber drop-off owed entirely to Rift's March 2011 launch.

It's entirely possible that 2011's other big MMO, EA and BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic, stole some of Blizzard's thunder. Beta testers had logged a collective one million hours in the game as of mid-November, and the beta counted an impressive two million players at its peak. Not to mention that The Old Republic captured one million registered users just two days into its official launch.

But let's examine World of Warcraft's own recent timeline. The Cataclysm expansion launched on December 7, 2010 -- exactly two months after Blizzard trumpeted an all-time high of 12 million global subscribers. Two major content patches separated these milestones; the first, patch 4.0.1, brought a multitude of sweeping changes to the game's core class mechanics, as well as a considerably more homogenized endgame gearing system. The second, patch 4.0.3a, remade the world of Azeroth, effectively relaunching World of Warcraft's first 60 experience levels in preparation for Cataclysm's inbound story arc.

The first few post-Cataclysm patches of 2011 brought staggering class and dungeon balance changes (patch 4.0.6 and patch 4.1.0), while June's 4.2.0 patch introduced the Dungeon Journal (a built-in encyclopedia of endgame boss encounters, abilities, and loot) and the World of Warcraft Starter Edition (which replaces the game's 10-day Free Trial with a limited free-to-play experience that caps at level 20). Note that by this point, World of Warcraft was already well into its subscription slump.

Just to reiterate, these changes and announcements happened to coincide with a 1.7 million subscriber drop over a 13-month period. If outcry on the forums and in-game is any indication, Blizzard's gone too far, too fast: Cataclysm's class changes were certainly the most pronounced of any World of Warcraft expansion yet, and Mists of Pandaria's impending talent tree overhaul rubbed plenty of players the wrong way when it was initially announced. The reasoning behind the redesign (limiting false choice and guaranteeing every character the necessary tools for success) is sound, but a lot of players seem to feel that it's an oversimplification which limits their choices -- even if many of those choices are illusory. To put it another way, "Blizzard's been wrecking my character for a year, so I am quitting."

Mists of Pandaria's upcoming talent tree redesign.

It's also possible that a lot of the barrier-to-entry changes had an unforeseen impact on World of Warcraft's population. The Dungeon Journal -- basically a built-in equivalent to the sorts of popular raiding add-ons that many top guilds already use anyway -- doesn't quite trivialize boss encounters, yet ritualizes them in a strangely official way. The homogenized endgame gearing system (which eschews the various emblem currencies in favor of straightforward point accrual and subsequent high-end gear purchases) further cements this notion of rote "checklist raiding." To top it off, November 2011's patch 4.3.0 added a Raid Finder tool, officially sidestepping the infamous organizational challenges inherent to assembling 25 players for the game's current tier of raiding.

In all fairness, the correlation between these events and the subscriber drop is a circumstantial one. But it's difficult to ignore the growing number of players who question Blizzard's embrace of a wider casual endgame audience, especially when concerns about the relative ease of Cataclysm raiding and even recent heroic (AKA hard mode) dungeons pop up with such alarming frequency. While some hardcore players' stodgy elitism ("You shouldn't even get to experience endgame raids unless you're the best of the best!") is unhealthy, one wonders if perhaps Blizzard's swung the pendulum too far in the other direction.

That's really just a long-winded way of saying "Is this stuff to blame for World of Warcraft's alarming 14.1% subscriber drop? Maybe!" The fact is, something's rotten in the world of Azeroth, and I'm inclined to lay that at the feet of the game itself, whether it's due to specific changes or a simple seven-year itch. Given Blizzard's typical patch cycle, I'd peg Mists of Pandaria for a September 2012 release (at the latest), but who knows what those numbers may look like by then. Activision Blizzard's due for another investor conference call in a few weeks -- hopefully the big bosses drop some good loot this time around.